Agencies
Services
Author Guide – Thursday, February 6, 2025
Is Your Webpage Gaslighting You? How to Correct a False "Unavailable" Message
You just finished creating your next AEM page masterpiece, published, and are ready to view it as an anonymous visitor to bask in your genius and artistic glory. You open the link and see “Site Temporarily Not Available.”
Time passes, and it is still not there!
But you have been waiting for hours! How long will “temporarily” last?
The short answer is simple:
Until you fix it!
More to life than cat videos
You have already read about the dreaded 404 and saw some amazing feline acrobatics in our article – 404: Not Found, But We Found Some Cat Videos Instead. However, after fixing all issues the article pointed out followed by wasting hours watching those silly cats, you now get the error shown above.
It seems you just cannot win! Keep reading, and follow the troubleshooting steps below. Then, not only will you conquer this error; you will look like an IT genius to all your friends and collegues.
A little bit of background
While the root cause most likely originates within AEM, the message itself comes from Akamai. Akamai is the content delivery network (CDN) the State of Illinois uses in conjuction with AEM.
In the most simple terms, Akamai holds a copy of all of published pages from agency websites hosted on AEM. Akamai asks AEM many times per hour for copies of the recent changes and updates itself accordingly. When a visitor loads an agency’s AEM page, the visitor’s browser actually talks to Akamai and asks for the most recent copy Akamai has of that page then sends it back to the browser.
With all the working pieces and so many places something could go wrong, safeguards are needed to minimize issues from becoming disasterous. These safeguards come from various sources. Which source it comes from depends on the type of error as well as where in the process the error was caught. This is why you may see different error pages when your website will not load. And because of this, remember when reporting an issue on a page to always include a link to the page, a screenshot of the error, and the steps to reproduce the error.
Remember, when reporting an issue on a page, always include:
- A link to the page,
- A screenshot of the error, and
- The steps to reproduce the error.
Why is this happening to me?
As stated above, there could be countless errors that we face. Additionally, each error could have multiple origins. Today, let’s continue to only focus on the “Site Temporarily Not Available.” If you are seeing this page, there are two main causes. Both should be relatively easy to track down:
- An empty or unconfigured component
- An unpublished page or folder somewhere within the path (the parent or grandparent pages/folders leading to your page)
Empty or unconfigured component
The first possible culprit should be relatively simple to troubleshoot. In Author, navigate to the page you were trying to load, edit and open up the Content Tree. Check the tree closely to ensure there is no component present which should not be. Concentrate mainly on the content components rather than the containers. The most notorious culprit is the Title component.
So, if you see a Title component without text after it, you may have found the reason for the error. You should generally check all your components and ensure configurations are set for each. If they are not, this would be a great time to fix them. If you are not 110% certain something should not be there, reach out to us and one of the DoIT Web Services team will gladly assist.
Unpublished page or folder
If you have already checked and found no unnecessary components, you most likely have narrowed the error down to an unpublished page or folder. When accessing a page on the web, your visitors always need a clear path to their destination.
Imagine arriving at a mall, and you are ready to shop at your favorite store. You exit your vehicle and walk to the building. You must open the front door, enter the vestibule, open the second door, walk to the elevator, ride it up, head to your store and proceed through the store’s front entrance. Now imagine the second vestibule door is locked and you cannot get to the path that would take you to your shopping paradise.
That second door, as well as all the other doors listed, must be unlocked to allow you to reach your destination. Unpublished pages between the homepage and your newly published page are like locked doors. The browser sees the door within the path, but cannot open it to get to the next step on the way to the desired destination. Let’s look at a real life example.
Your supervisor heard about our previous article on 404 errors and sends you the following link:
You are undoubtedly familiar with our Author Guide’s address: https://wcmauthorguide.illinois.gov. The name of the page, on which the article resides is 404—not-found—but-we-found-some-cat-videos-instead.html. Separating the home page and the article page are two redirect pages used for organizing the news. Nearly all of the agencies that are on AEM use a similar structure. If we publish the article page but not news and/or 2024, a visitor will most likely receive the Akamai error shown at the start of this article. We have thus succeeded in confusing the browser because it asked for a page that Akamai never knew existed.
You fixed it!!!
Thankfully, you read this article and emailed Web Services telling us to ensure all pages in the path were published and no empty or unconfigured components were present on the page. Thank you for that! And also a big thumbs up for including a link to this article in your email!
Hopefully, you were able to gain insight on yet another one of the many errors you or your visitors may…but hopefully never will...experience. You are now mentally and technologically equipped to troubleshoot your agency’s site and fix the issues if ever that nasty page appears. You will be the envy of your department! But be warned, once word gets out, you may become the first call for any technological mishap!